by Hooray » Sun Dec 03, 2017 12:57 pm
I agree with Thorsten: that is exactly the reason why we now have OPTIONAL features like the effects system, Advanced Weather, ALS or the Canvas system: at some point some developer thought it would be a cool idea and they implemented these ideas despite nowing very well that some hardware may be left out of the loop, but these are after all optional components - and as time has proven over and over again, these are the decisions that make FlightGear development progress enormously.
A few years ago, a dedicated gaming rig would be $2k US - these days, the same multi-GPU machine would be under 500 bucks.
If you are stuck with old hardware, simply disable optional stuff and use custom settings - or an older FlightGear version.
If FlightGear development were to continue with the mindset that all legacy hardware must continue to be supported, it would also be stuck.
Note though that I totally agree that new stuff must remain optional and should not become mandatory without a reason.
As a matter of fact, I am finding myself more and more often in the same camp of people who no longer build FlightGear regularly, because we're seeing an increasing tendency to adopt the "latest & greatest", especially in the Qt5 department - a few years ago, it would not have been tolerated on the devel list if an optional component (as in the Qt5 launcher or the FGQCanvas work) were breaking the default build for the rest of the people building from source not even wanting those features - equally, just continuing to simply raise the required version number to "solve" these problems would have been frowned upon.
So there's that, too. But that has nothing to do with hardware requirements - it's more to do with carefully managing software requirements in general, and formalizing those so that people can play by the rules. Anyway, if new features are truly added in an optional fashion, I do think it's a good thing - no matter if that means raising hardware or software requirements, but it should definitely be opt-in, or we'll be seeing more and more people use a more conservatively managed fork, like the osgEarth sources, which simply continue to work for most of us, i.e. are not affected by the whole Qt5 fallout.